There is an increasing demand for a technique to recognize characters from an image taken by a camera or the like. In order to appropriately recognize characters contained in an image, it is required in some cases to set reference lines along which characters are to be placed. For example, a technique that represents the outline of a region where each character is shown by a feature vector and sets reference lines to the character in an image on the basis of the feature vector is known (for example, see Patent Literature 1).